The whiskey burned as he drew deeply from the bottle again and rested his head on the back of the sofa, eyes closed. Although a damn poor substitute, fantasy was all he had, as close as he would ever get. Sometimes he imagined what it would be like to be whole, to feel life. To be with Brit. All that dark red hair falling around her shoulders, light blue eyes, soft full lips parted.
She would be beautiful, so pale and yielding and warm beneath his fingers. He always imagined her in the huge bed he never slept in with the deep royal blue sheets. If he were honest, he would admit he’d chosen the damn thing with her in mind. The silver and blue would be a decadent and dark backdrop against her skin.
In his dreams, her belly was gently rounded with his child, her body ripe with the hope of a future. A life. But it was just fantasy. Right now the only thing he could hope for was to drink this bottle down fast enough to pass out before his metabolism worked the alcohol through his system.
Tag took another deep drink, but the liquor had less bite, especially next to the pain of the worthless dreams that moved through his head. He was a fool and he knew it, yet the images still came, still taunted him. He couldn’t escape them. Not even in sleep…
* * * *
A smooth long-fingered hand slid down his chest, the cool weight a balm to the torment that seethed just beneath the surface. He opened his eyes and looked into that blue gaze that haunted all his sleeping hours and entirely too many of the waking ones. Dark red brows arched delicately over those cerulean depths that drew him in. She leaned over him. The smooth material of one of his shirts clung to every curve and stopped just above the juncture between her bare thighs. One of his favorite looks for her—his shirt and nothing else.
This was another of those fantasies he was too weak to resist. The vivid dreams only further indicated how weak he’d actually grown, how deeply he’d descended into his final heat. It was hell on the mind as well as the body. And he couldn’t make himself fight it.
Tag sighed when her hands bracketed his face, her fingers moving over the creases between his brows, smoothing out the lines. Her gaze held him, eased him.
“So troubled.” That appealing Irish lilt in her voice washed over him. Cupping his cheeks, she leaned down, and he could feel her soft, unbound breasts brush over his chest as she pressed a kiss to each eyelid.
The cushion shifted beneath him as she slowly lowered herself to straddle his lap, and he felt the full, bare flesh of her bottom on his thighs. His cock rose hard between them, unfettered by pants. It was his fantasy, after all. He dropped his gaze to her lips—a dark, wet coral—as she leaned in to kiss him. It was a light press, a simple yielding, and he absorbed her submission into him, his dragon expanding inside to accept her.
Her skin was warm and smooth beneath his hands, and he savored the slide of his palms up her outer thighs, how her soft hips yielded in his hands when he gripped them. He deepened the kiss, drawing in her breath when her lips parted, running his tongue over the pliable flesh, tasting her. She tasted of the melon she loved so much, fresh and ripe. Her tongue met and slid over his as he pulled her up over his pulsing erection, his dragon roaring in satisfaction when the heat of her arousal coated him, sending a wildness careening through him, ending his easy appreciation of her.
The need to see all of her was overwhelming, and he pushed his hands beneath the borrowed shirt to pull it up and over her head, revealing every fair inch of her sleek body. She shook out her silken hair, and it cascaded in a dark red fall around her shoulders. A growl catching in his throat, he clenched his hands around her hips and lifted her so he could slide inside the clutching wet heat of her pussy. That first kiss of her body around his took his breath, and his hips tightened in anticipation of driving hard up into her, but he resisted. He needed to savor this first thrust, to savor her.
She arched her back, her beautiful peach-tipped breasts rising into the air, and reached for him with a low gasping cry. Tag watched her with awe, this incredible sense of wonder. He caught her seeking hands with his and threaded their fingers together. She was gorgeous. A miracle.
“She’s grown into a beautiful woman.”
The harsh, haggard whisper was familiar, a voice he hadn’t heard in nearly twenty years. A voice he had hoped and yet feared to never hear again. His dragon rose hard both in welcome and fury. The disparity of raging emotions tore through him, and he turned his head to stare in disbelief at the man that now knelt on the couch next to him.
The man’s dark eyes were fixed with wonder on Brit as he reached out with a trembling hand to touch the fall of red hair. “A miracle.”
* * * *
Tag came awake with a jerk, gasping, heart thundering, and pressed his hands to his chest. He sat up and looked down. Still dressed but with one hell of an erection. When he shifted to search the room around him, an empty bottle of whiskey rolled to the floor with a hollow clatter. The room was eerily quiet, just his heavy breathing. And yet…
“Vincent?”
He sent the thought out into a void he hadn’t acknowledged in so many years that he’d learned to just accept the abyss as a part of him. It was now a yawning emptiness that once was filled by the other half of himself.
“Taggart.”
That larger-than-life presence poured into him in a disorienting rush, and he surged drunkenly to his feet, sending the bottle skittering across the hardwood floor as he spun in confusion, searching. With a cold rise of dread and anticipation rushing through his veins, he turned his gaze to the screen showing the security feed from the front of the building…and the big man standing on the sidewalk in the hazy light that constituted a San Francisco dawn.
“You’re here.”
The man shifted and looked directly up into the camera at him.
“Hello, brother.”
Chapter Four
“I’m here for Dr. Britony Mahoney.”
Vin’s explanation of why the hell he’d shown up in Tag’s part of the world after twenty years was only one more reason he had a real mean going right now. Forget that the man had dishonored their family when he’d joined up with the Triumvirate. Forget he’d fucking condemned them both to an early death when he’d taken off without as much as an explanation. But the bastard had to show up
now
and mention the doc’s name when she was already under suspicion? Tag was man enough to admit that
that
above all else had him wanting to tear into his brother.
“I’m curious, Dr. Jennings, why you believe she would be here,” Kyeros Forestor, the owner of Incog and Tag’s boss, said in his smooth, emotionless tone. The negligent way Kyeros leaned against the far wall of the interrogation room with his arms crossed over his chest didn’t disguise the power that pulsed from the Guardian.
Tag slumped silently at the far end of the table in the wrinkled T-shirt and jeans he’d been wearing for nearly two days. He glared across the table at his brother with eyes that burned from lack of sleep and a fury he’d been struggling to contain for too long. Vin, the bastard, stared calmly back at him, one ankle casually propped on his knee and his arms crossed over a dark blue button-down shirt. Tag tilted his head to see that his brother wore slacks—creased. Even his damn hair, the thick curly black mess they both shared, was perfectly groomed. Tag resisted the urge to run his hand over his head in comparison. There was a good reason he kept it sheared close to the scalp; he’d never been able to control it.
Long ago their differences had served to distinguish the close twins as individuals, but now they only made the chasm between them so much wider.
“Dr. Jennings?” Forestor prompted.
Vin leveled his gaze on Forestor. “I’m sorry, was that a question?”
“All right, then,
why
did you believe Dr. Mahoney would be here?” Forestor corrected.
Vin gave Forestor a long look before turning back to Tag with a casual, “I never said I believed she was here.”
Tag knew this side of Vin—or he
had
known
this side of his brother before fate had taken a big old dump on their “fated” future. Vin was the polar opposite of Tag. While he’d been rebellious with a quick temper, his brother had a quiet stubbornness about him that made Tag want to and—on occasion—actually punch him right in his stiff upper lip. From experience Tag knew Forestor wouldn’t get anywhere until Vin was damn good and ready.
Why was his brother here after nearly twenty years of nothing? He was after something or more like someone—the doc. The question was why, and considering the shit the doc was in right now…Tag didn’t like the answers he was coming up with. It obviously had to do with the fucked-up genetic research the doc was being accused of.
“Then why are you here, Dr. Jennings?”
Tag heard a faint buzz in his head like that of an insect. Resisting it made his nose burn and gave him a vicious headache. He narrowed his eyes on his brother. Vin was a monster of a telepath, and few were able to keep him out when he wanted in. Except Tag. He could block his twin, but that burn in his nose would escalate into a full bleed if he persisted for too long. Tag gritted his teeth. He’d take the fucking bloody nose, because he’d be damned if he’d let the asshole in his head again.
“I believe you and your little soldiers escorted me in.” Vin casually answered the question, but he kept his eyes focused on Tag.
Tag held his brother’s gaze as that buzzing intensified and the burning in his nose made his eyes water. He swallowed hard to neutralize the nausea and keep from blinking. A wet rivulet of blood trickled onto his upper lip, and the pressure was gone as suddenly as it appeared.
“Very well,” Vin snapped, finally showing a crack in his emotionless armor as anger seeped from him. He twisted to face Forestor. “I believe Dr. Mahoney is in danger. I thought perhaps I could assist in rescuing her, but I can see she’s been summarily deemed guilty and left to her own devices.”
Tag’s dragon surged to the fore and clawed at his veil-thin control. He came to his feet, sending the chair crashing against the wall behind him, his blood pounding in his ears.
“You don’t get to fucking come in here and make judgment calls. You don’t know a damn thing about the doc. Or me.”
Vin shot to his feet and leaned forward, weight resting on his hands splayed on the tabletop. The sparks were nearly visible in the air between them.
“What I do know is the threat to your
doc
is very real, and yet you sit in this”
—he cast a scornful glance around the room—“
fortress, allowing the risk.”
Tag gripped the end of the table so hard his knuckles turned white. Vin was right. Tag was safe, and the doc most likely wasn’t. It was hard as hell to use the last dangling shred of his intelligence to approach this impassively. The truth was he was emotionally invested in Doc, had been for years, but he was loyal to Forestor—to Incog—and his honor was invested in
that
. And his honor was the only difference between who he was now and who his brother had become. It made for a bitch of a line to walk—especially now that Vin was here.
“It’s complicated.”
Tag spun away to rub a hand over his head. He was aware of Forestor watching the two of them, studying them. He could practically feel his boss weighing his loyalty with those damn eyes. Forestor was a full-blood Guardian, a damn powerful one, and his senses were razor sharp. So while he might not be able to hear their telepathic dialogue, he was cueing in on the changes in their bodies and filling the rest in with that wicked intelligence.
Forestor pushed away from the wall to circle the table, voice calm as he asked, “What is your interest in Dr. Mahoney?”
Vin suddenly withdrew the intensity of his outrage and impatience from the room, and the absence of it gave Tag a momentary sense of weightlessness that had him reeling. With a frown, he glared at his brother. Vin had just made a full mental retreat, his gaze sharp and calculated as he stared at Forestor. Vin gave nothing away as he reseated himself, but the instant nothingness in itself was telling—at least to Tag. Vin had always been controlled, even-tempered. The extremes Tag had seen from his brother in the last few minutes betrayed something bigger on the horizon.
“The better question, Mr. Forestor, would be why Dr. Mahoney is of interest to them, don’t you think?” Vin asked with a raised brow as he tracked Forestor’s movement around the room.
Tag flicked a glance to Forestor and stepped closer. “Them? Nobody made her do anything. I watched all the damn footage. Doc walked out of here of her own free will.”
A shadow shifted in Vin’s hazel eyes, making them appear more brown than green. “Compulsion doesn’t always include physical force, brother.”
“You think someone is pulling the doc’s strings,
brother
? If you knew the doc, you would know how ridiculous that is. No one makes her do what she doesn’t want to. ” Tag rubbed the short growth of hair on his face and picked up his chair with a grunt. That was the root of this big ugly. Doc left because it was what she wanted, and no matter what angle he approached it with, he couldn’t come up with a reason why she would do this, at least not one that would exonerate her.
“Some compulsions are stronger than even stubbornness.” Vin’s voice was gentle this time, and Tag resented that more, if that was even possible.
Tag shook his head, a rumble building in his chest. He slammed the chair down in frustration and straddled it. “Why the hell should we believe anything you say anyway? You’ve been working for the Triumvirate for years. She could very well have been in league with you from day one.” The words tasted bitter on his tongue. He didn’t want to believe Doc was capable of that level of betrayal.
Tag glared at his twin. Twenty years ago, they’d been as close as two men could be. Brothers. Fated twins, sharing the incredible weight of what that meant. And then Vin was just gone—to work with their enemies, no less—leaving Tag to bear the disillusionment of their people alone. If his own brother could do that to him, who was to say the doc wouldn’t do the same? After all, the only thing between the doc and him was his consuming yet hopeless desire to mate her.